To celebrate #InternationalWomensDay our music team are sharing some of their favourite pieces by woman composers with us.
This beautiful organ piece was composed by Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) who was a student of Sir Walter Parratt. She studied for a time in Bach’s hometown of Leipzig, where she met Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, and was undoubtedly influenced by the music of the continent. She wrote larger scale operas and orchestral works, but her contemporary success as a composer was limited by her gender.
She is well known as a suffragette, and wrote the March of the Women, which became the anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
The basis of her prelude, ‘O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid’, or, ‘O darkest woe, O heart’s pain’, is a hymn for use on Good Friday. It is written almost as a small-scale prelude and fugue, in which the ‘prelude’ is an ornamented chorale prelude.
Thank you to Assistant Organist and Director of the Girls’ Choir Hilary for sharing it with us.
The Chelmsford Cathedral choir sang ‘A Hymne to Christ’, by Imogen Holst at a recent service of Evensong. The words are from John Donne’s poem of the same name.
Imogen was the daughter of famed composer Gustav Holst, and she studied composition with Herbert Howells and attended the Royal College of Music, where she studied piano, composition and conducting. Later in life, she was assistant to Benjamin Britten, and made significant contributions towards his work.